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Trump-loving gays say their MAGA support is ruining their lives
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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A cult is a small religion. Scientology is big. The new definition platforms ahistorical biases that attack smaller religions, particularly those with hundreds of years of history as cults, through linguistic association with abuse. That's bad. It perpetuates satanic panic dogma.
Earlier you insinuated that scientology was small, now you're saying it's big. You don't like the usual meaning of the word cult because you prefer to make cult mean "small religion" (which I think is a pretty pointless definition and confusing for most people). You claim that this is because it's bad to have a word for a secretive group whose members lose personal autonomy or is otherwise particularly abusive. I don't see it as in any way bad to be able to make that distinction, and I'm suspicious of the motives for removing it.
Citing "satanic panic dogma", you mysteriously conclude the mere existence of a word with connotations of abuse is bad. It smells like a cover up, but I have no idea what you're trying to blur the lines between because you haven't made it clear which group that we saw as abusive you want us to reinterpret as merely small, or which group that we saw as merely small (and not cultish) you want us to use the word cult for.
You claim that something is ahistorical, but it's never really clear what, since you aren't using many of the key words to mean the same as the rest of us and haven't made explicit the context that you're referring to. I'd guess it's something to do with the 1970s, but that's really just a guess, I have no idea.
No I didn't. I said scientology isn't a cult. My reasoning was that it's too big. You're just bad at listening.
No I don't. You really need to work on your listening skills. I'm saying that using an already existing word, which already describes a set of marginalised groups, as a slur is bad. For example, suppose white Christians went around saying that "person of colour" means criminal. That would be horrible, right? Do you understand why? It's because using a term that already describes vulnerable people as a bad word is bad.
No, I'm not bad at listening, you're bad at being clear and honest about what you mean.
I read some of your comments elsewhere in this thread, and you feel that the word cult has been used negatively against Wiccans and Hellenists. You spend some time arguing that only big religions have the clout and money to be harmful, and you want the word cult to mean specifically just small rather than abusive.
The problem is that you lost the battle over the meaning of that word about 80 years ago from what I can tell from reading it up. You may as well try to stop people from using the word fantastic in a positive light and just use it to mean absurdly implausible. It's too late. The meaning has changed. Rather than saying things like "Wicca is a cult, it's just not harmful because it's not a religion, stop using the word cult to mean harmful" instead, say things like "Hellenism isn't a large, harmful religion, it's a small harmless one". You seem to identify with "cult" and you see that as positive and you dislike larger religions which you see as harmful. Instead of arguing over the meaning of the word cult, argue with people who criticise Hellenism.
You picked a big long argument over the meaning of the word cult because you can't let go of a meaning from a century ago. Meanwhile your intent was lost because you didn't make your perspective clear early on.
Here's how society is: when it sees an abusive group using religious ideas led by someone with a big personality, it calls it a cult, meaning it loosely and negatively, and then you shoot into the argument saying "no, no, don't call them a cult, they're a religion". To everyone else, you sound like you're defending them, whereas what you mean is "don't use the word cult for bad things", but that's not what you say! Not for a long time! It's a different day and we're tens of comments away from when you first tried to intervene! You obliquely say stull like "no, they're not a cult they're too big, and they're too powerful" and then people say "but cults can be big and powerful" and you say "no, cults are only small. big powerful ones are called religions" and the whole argument isn't explicitly about what you mean. Your point is lost.
It's like saying "no I'm not a troll, I live in a 1980s semi" when you'd be far better off saying "no, I wasn't being sarcastic at all - I meant it, we just disagree". The word troll has changed its meaning, and trying to talk about height or whether someone lives in a house in an argument about whether someone is arguing in bad faith, without ever mentioning caves, which was your real point, because your great aunt lives in one of the ancient cliff homes of Matera in Italy, but inexplicably you never mention it.
Rebrand. Give up on the word cult. I know it has all kinds of positive connotations for you, but that ship has sailed for the rest of society. You'd get a lot more sympathy if you were just open and honest from the start, like "I'm a pagan and we always got called a cult pejoratively in the 1970s and I don't like people using that word negatively. Could you use the word religion instead?" and then at least the people arguing with you know what they're arguing about. You'll still lose that argument, but at least you wouldn't waste as much time being indirect. It's simpler to give up on the word and rebrand. After all, "Wicca" and "White witch" are rebrands, avoiding the negative connotations of witchcraft (eg poisons and love potions aka date rate drugs). Rebranding works. The satanists regularly troll rightwingers/christofascists by asserting their religious freedom to oppose the abusive anti-minority practices of the alt-right in ways that are popular online. Not by saying "stop calling bad religions satanic".
By the way, wikipedia thinks there are somewhere around 800,000 wiccans and less than 40,000 scientologists, so I think even that by your own definition, scientology is more of a cult than wicca. But in terms of using the legal system to silence opponents, it's certainly much more powerful. Did you want me to stop calling things cults if they're powerful now?